The Holocaust Living History Workshop - Spring 2010

During spring quarter 2010, the Holocaust Living History Workshop will be hosting a number of special events on campus during which local Holocaust survivors will share their stories of struggle and survival. The presentations will take place on March 31st, April 7th, April 14th, April 19th, and May 12th. Each presentation, except for that of April 19th, will take place in the Seuss Room in the Geisel Library Building. The last presentation of April will be in the Great Hall on the Eleanor Roosevelt campus, from 5:30 to 8:00PM as part of a larger series for a Hate Free campus, and also part of Hate Free Week. At these presentations, members of the campus community and the public will have the opportunity to meet the survivors and hear their stories, as well as learn about other survivors' testimony from the USC Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive, which includes the personal stories of more than 50,000 survivors of the Holocaust. All events are free and open to the public.

On March 31st, our series will begin with a presentation by Mrs. Doris Martin. Mrs. Martin was born in Bedzin, Poland and survived the Bedzin Ghetto and the Ludwigsdorf and Auschwitz concentration camps.

On April 7th, Mrs. Fanny Krasner-Lebovitz will speak. Mrs. Krasner-Lebovitz was born in Liepaja, Latvia and survived the Liepaja Ghetto and the Stolp, Stutthof, Riga-Kaiserwald, Riga-Reichsbahn, and Danzig/Schichau-Weft concentration camps.

On April 14th, Rose Schindler will discuss her experiences in the Holocaust. Mrs. Schindler was born in Seredné, Czechoslovakia and survived Uzhorod Ghetto, Freudenthal concentration camp, and Auschwitz II-Birkenau death camp. She resides in San Diego with her husband, Max Schindler, who is also a Holocaust survivor.

As part of UCSD Hate Free Week, Mrs. Agathe Ehrenfried will speak on April 19th. She was born in Rákosliget, Hungary and survived Mühldorf, Kraukau-Plaslow, and Ausburg concentration camps and Auschwitz II-Birkenau death camp. This presentation will be part of the Hate Free Week events here at UCSD. The event will also feature a discussion of the Armenian Genocide by Yeghig Keshishian, Armenian Assembly Western Office Director, and a panel of students from various organizations who will talk about their experiences of stereotyping and racism on our campus. Also as part of Hate Free Week, the Workshop will sponsor the Davka Exhibit, which will be up at Geisel Library from April 19th to April 23rd. It will be open for public viewing during all library hours.

The April 19th discussion and Davka exhibit is the first of a 4-event series on tolerance. It will be part of a 4-event series on this topic. The next three events will take place April 26th, May 3rd, and May 12th. On April 26th in the Great Hall, from 6pm-7:30pm, there will be a panel discussion by UCSD Professors about issues of tolerance. On May 3rd a panel of students will gather to follow up on the discussion of professors, reflect on our campus situation, and lead a lively discussion.

The last event will be on May 12th in the Seuss Room, Hanna Marx and Gerhard Maschowsky will share the stories of their experiences in the Holocaust. Mrs. Marx was born in Hamm, Germany and survived the Riga Ghetto and Stutthof and Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camps. Mr. Maschowsky was born in Elbing, Germany and survived Mühldorf, Nuendorf, Auschwitz, Auschwitz III-Monowitz, Uberwüstegiersdorf, and Gelsenkirchen concentration camps.

The UC San Diego Libraries are one of only three university libraries on the West Coast to have access to the USC Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive, founded by film maker Steven Spielberg to document the stories of Holocaust survivors for his movie, "Schindler's List." In 1994, Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organization, to collect and preserve more than 50,000 firsthand accounts of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. The foundation became the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education in 2006.

The Holocaust Living History Workshop, launched in 2007, aims to teach the history of the Holocaust through two methods of face-to-face contact, both with Holocaust survivors and their children and through the Visual History Archive. Student volunteers have received special training on how to search through the testimonies in the massive Archive, and then teach survivors and their families—from multiple generations—how to use the database. These families can then use the archive to conduct their own searches in order to learn about other people, and in some cases relatives, who had similar Holocaust experiences.

The archive of 52,000 digital oral histories recorded by Holocaust survivors and other witnesses is the foundation for the Holocaust Living History Workshop, a program that has brought together UC San Diego students, San Diego holocaust survivors, and their children. The Workshop, which was established to expand the usefulness and the impact of the Archive, has proven to be a powerful tool for discovering family history and preserving memories for survivors, their families, and members of the community.

The Visual History Archive, which includes the testimonies of Holocaust survivors from 40,000 specific geographic locations in languages ranging from Bulgarian and Greek to Japanese and Spanish, can be accessed by members of the public from any computer on the UC San Diego campus.

To find out more about UC San Diego's Holocaust Living History Workshop, contact Marina Triner at lib-mtriner@ad.ucsd.edu (or 858.534.7661) or go to: http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/sites/hlhw Interested members of the public are welcome to attend one of the weekly Visual History Archive training open-houses, held on Wednesdays from 5-7 p.m.

The UC San Diego Libraries, ranked among the top 25 public academic research libraries in the nation, play an integral role in advancing and supporting the university's research, teaching, patient care, and public service missions. The nine libraries that make up the UCSD Library system provide access to more than 7 million digital and print volumes, journals, and multimedia materials to meet the knowledge demands of scholars, students, and members of the public. Each day, more than 7,300 people stream through one of the university's nine libraries. The Libraries' vast resources and services are accessed more than 87,500 times each day via the UCSD Libraries' Web site.